


We're Tasting a Sweeter Life

by apolloadama



Series: I Can Feel You [4]
Category: Fringe
Genre: Blue Lincoln x Red Olivia, Cats, F/M, catsitting, working through ~feelings~ and stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-09
Updated: 2012-07-09
Packaged: 2017-11-09 11:44:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apolloadama/pseuds/apolloadama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part four of the I Can Feel You series. Hannah and I had this idea that Nick totally has a cat, and that turned into "What if Lincoln and Liv catsit for Nick" and that turned into this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We're Tasting a Sweeter Life

**Author's Note:**

> Rosie basically looks like [this cat.](http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6vk6xIHPT1qbd8xd.png)

He’s dreaming about being wrapped up in clouds at sunset, fluffy puffs of pink and red and purple bunched around him, holding him up in the air and keeping him there easily, the heat of the sun dropping below the horizon piercing through the clouds and keeping him so, so warm, an impossible warm that pushes through his limbs and chest and face. Just as the sun finally sets, his brain wakes up and he’s aware of being in bed, nestled in blankets with something warm and soft—and a blurry red, when he opens his eyes a crack—pressed up against his face, and he smiles into her hair and hums happily, reaching his arm out to hug Liv against him, but all he feels is empty bed.

“Wha—?”

“Should I be jealous?”

Lincoln swivels his head toward the bedroom door and sees Liv standing there wearing one of his button-down shirts and not much else. He turns back to his pillow, to the red soft warmth he was so sure had been her hair, and realizes, embarrassed, that it was the cat.

“Her fur and your hair are exactly the same color,” Lincoln says defensively, staring at the cat and back at Liv again, trying to reconcile that they are two different fuzzy red things. “And I don’t have my glasses on.”

“Does her fur really feel like my hair?” Liv asks, grinning at him. 

“Kind of,” Lincoln admits. “Nick must brush her a lot, she’s awfully soft.” He smiles at Rosie, who still has her face tucked underneath her bushy tail. Lincoln can’t help but reach out a hand to scratch behind her ears, and she trills a startled noise and pulls her head up, looking at him accusingly. 

Liv laughs. “I know exactly how you feel, Rosie. He just can’t leave the pretty girls alone when they’re sleeping.”

Lincoln frowns and picks his glasses up off the nightstand, putting them on and looking back at Liv. “I don’t keep you up at night, do I?”

Liv just smirks at him and puts her hands on her hips. “I made breakfast.”

“Do I snore?” Lincoln asks seriously. 

She shakes her head at him, laughing silently. “It’s fine, Lincoln. I was just kidding.”

“But I—”

“You’re just very cuddly,” she finally says, shrugging. 

Lincoln’s face falls and he pushes his legs out from under the blankets, standing up. “Is cuddly bad?”

Liv tilts her head to the side. “Sometimes I guess it’s a little hard to sleep with you wrapped around me like an octopus, but I also kinda like it.”

“Shit,” Lincoln says, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. “I… should sleep in the guest room again?”

“Lincoln,” Liv says, a warning in her voice. “Let it go. It’s fine.”

“But if you—”

“There are pancakes,” she interrupts, turning to leave the doorway, saying over her shoulder, “And tea is steeping.” 

Lincoln sighs and gets out of bed, looking back at Rosie still curled up in a ball on his pillow. He wonders if he smothers her in bed, too. He’s a little out of practice at sharing a bed with another person, and perhaps the addition of a cat just made it even worse for Liv.

“Do I hog the blankets?” he asks Liv as he comes out of the bedroom.

She looks at him and laughs outright. “Are we really still talking about this?”

“I just don’t want to… impose…”

“You’re not imposing,” she insists. “I like having you here. The apartment feels whole with you in it.” More quietly, she adds, “I feel whole.”

He smiles at her across the kitchen and holds back from walking over and wrapping his arms around her waist, pressing her against the refrigerator and leaving kisses up and down her face and neck, possibly lower…

“I don’t have real maple syrup,” Liv says suddenly, looking a little uncomfortable. “It’s hard to get syrup when you don’t have trees. But they invented a real convincing substitute awhile ago so—”

“It’s fine,” he says, and she lays three pancakes onto a plate and pushes it across the kitchen island at him. 

As Lincoln spreads butter over the pancakes he feels a brush against his calf and looks down. Rosie is winding her way through his ankles, rubbing up against him and arching her back. 

“And what do you want?” he asks her, and she looks up and meows, quirking her ears back.

“Nick’s gonna be heartbroken when he finds out Rosie likes you better,” Liv says, grinning. 

“She just wants food,” Lincoln says, leaning down and scratching her back. “Don’t you?” Rosie looks up at him and meows again plaintively. Lincoln laughs at her. “Yep, that’s the ‘my bowl’s empty’ meow.”

“She’s only been here a week and you already know her meows?”

“There are only a few,” Lincoln answers, moving to the cabinet to scoop cat food into Rosie’s bowl. “There’s the hungry meow, the ‘pet me’ meow, and the ‘play with me’ meow.”

“I’ve also become familiar with the ‘why isn’t Lincoln home’ meow,” Liv says.

Lincoln looks up, his mouth pulling into a wide smile. “She does not. She likes you just as much.”

Liv watches Rosie walk to the bowl and take a few bites. “I think she can tell I don’t worship her as much as you do,” she says to Lincoln, winking. “Anyway, I’ve always been more of a dog person. But she is a sweet cat.”

“I’m glad we agreed to cat-sit,” Lincoln says. “Nick just thought leaving her alone for two weeks was too long but Kendra really wanted him to spend… ‘significant’ time with the new baby.”

Liv smiles softly. “Of course. Nick asked me so nicely. He also seemed to think having a cat might help us…”

Lincoln looks up, furrowing his brow. “Help us how?”

She looks away and her mouth shifts into a slight frown. “Nothing in particular.”

Lincoln watches her for a few seconds, but Liv doesn’t give him anything. He sighs and pours the maple syrup substitute over his pancakes.

It’s been a month since their first strange, perfect kiss, with Nick standing watching them finally come together. With Liv since then everything was quick and bright, their kisses in bed at night like stars in Lincoln’s sky. He often wonders what a surreal thing it is, that they both fell in love with their alternates but couldn’t quite find the footing, couldn’t get things moving properly, and then circumstances brought them together and—well. Lincoln couldn’t even picture the other Olivia’s face anymore, for how much Liv had taken over his consciousness. Because their faces were different, despite technically, sort of, being the same person. Olivia’s face had been—Lincoln struggles to remember—closed off, sad, until Peter came, and then like a flower turning to its sun, devoted and loved so fully. Liv’s face is—totally different. Like fire: bright, full of life, constantly changing; but it’s also secretive, like she knows so many things that Lincoln wants to know, too, but which he can’t find the right passwords for. He never knows what to say to open her up.

Lincoln looks down at Rosie sitting at his feet. He kneels and scratches her underneath her chin, eliciting a loud purr. Liv watches them for a second and then abruptly picks up her plate of pancakes and heads to the table. Lincoln stays kneeling on the floor, Rosie pushing her face against his hand, and he tries to figure out what he’s doing wrong.

-

Later he’s on the couch taking a nap while Liv is out for a run. Rosie is sprawled out on the back of the couch, one paw draped down pressed just so against Lincoln’s shoulder. 

He wakes up very gradually to the sound of the door opening and the familiar tread of Liv’s feet across the floor. It’s quiet for a few minutes, and he almost falls back asleep before he feels a hand press gently against his face, fingers tracing a line from his forehead to his jaw. He gropes toward consciousness and is finally able to get his eyes open just as Liv is pushing a kiss onto his cheek. 

She pulls back and he focuses in on the sheen of sweat on her neck, the flush in her cheeks, the red of her lips. Their eyes lock. Liv quirks her mouth up into a half-grin and asks, softly, “Want to take a shower with me?”

“Do I smell _that_ bad?” Lincoln mumbles, but he’s sitting up rapidly, his head swimming a little from the rush of blood. Rosie lifts her head and meows at them as Liv helps lift him to his feet. 

“Not now, Rosie,” Lincoln says to her absently, his full attention on Liv. He follows her down the hall into the bathroom, another item of clothing dropping every two feet until they reach the shower and Liv pushes him, naked, under the water and shimmies out of her underwear before joining him with a laugh. 

After, they slide out of the tub together and just make it to the bed in a wet slippery heap. Lincoln’s face is pressed up against Liv’s back, his arms slowly tightening around her. As he falls asleep, he’s barely conscious of one of his legs snaking over hers, but then he’s lost in dreams where the fresh clean smell of her permeates his entire universe. 

-

“Ow!” Lincoln wakes suddenly and looks up. 

Rosie is sitting over him, one of her paws hovering, ready to press her claws carefully into his flesh again to get his attention. She’s not—not _scratching_ —just—causing enough pain to wake him up for some unknowable, obnoxious reason. He can’t move very easily so he just blows at her chest, and she blinks at him a few times before walking to the edge of the bed and jumping down. 

It’s then that Lincoln becomes aware of the way he’s sleeping. Liv wasn’t kidding about him wrapping around her like an octopus. He’s embarrassed at how close he’s pulled their bodies together. His arms aren’t just wrapped around her, they’re clutching at her, hands grabbing and squeezing wherever they land. His legs pin her close. It’s like extreme spooning. He feels immensely guilty and consciously forces himself to let her go, give her breathing room. 

Liv rolls away from him with a gentle exhale, and he realizes she’s still asleep. How she’s gotten used to him sleeping with her like that is beyond him; it can’t be comfortable for her to be used like a body pillow. 

Lincoln shifts so he’s about a foot away from her on the bed and lies back, threading his fingers behind his head and staring up at the ceiling. It’s unlike him to be so—cuddly is the word, Lincoln decides. It’s always been hard for him to be physically affectionate with people, a byproduct of a life spent being everyone’s second-best friend. The revelation of his relationship with his original universe’s Nick Lane had changed the way he could express his emotion on a more intellectual level, and it was almost like his heart had grown to accommodate the full depth of feeling he had for Liv… but it hadn’t changed his physical impulses. Sure, he _wanted_ to hug and touch and grab at her all the time, but he couldn’t—quite—make himself do it. 

Unless he’s asleep, apparently. He wonders about that. He wonders how many of his casual sexual partners in the past had had to deal with that, but he’s always been a heavy sleeper except for the insomnia he suffered from after joining Fringe Division on the other side and… he never knew. 

_Or maybe I’m just like that with her_ , he thinks. He’s home with her. The way she looks at him, the way they make each other laugh, the way they know the right things to say to stop each other from crying—Liv is _it_ , for him. So he wraps himself around her in his unconsciousness, clinging to the person who keeps him tethered to a life he’d always wanted but never knew how to have. 

He sighs heavily and gets up, stretching and pulling on a T-shirt boxers, then heading out the bedroom and down the hall to the kitchen to start dinner. When Liv wakes up from naps she’s always starving, and it’s his turn to cook, anyway. 

Lincoln’s not feeling ambitious, so he opts for grilled cheese and tomato soup from a can. He’s feeling awkward, uncomfortable in his own skin, and he stands over the pan of grilled cheese watching the butter on the bread slowly melt instead of reading or watching something on his tablet. 

He tries to figure out what to do, how to stop being—the way he is. He had thought maybe coming to this universe might be a way to start over for himself, create a new life where he could forget all the self-consciousness that’s plagued him most of his adult life, but instead he’s just found new ways to be embarrassed, and his thing with Liv has—it’s good, but it feels stagnant. He doesn’t know how to push forward. This isn’t a puzzle he can solve, his relationship with Liv. 

Lincoln flips the grilled cheese sandwiches and lets them brown on the other side as he pours a can of tomato soup into a pot (pausing a moment to stare at the Campbell’s label, which in this universe is blue and red instead of the familiar white and red—Lincoln makes a mental note to hunt down how this difference happened) and lets it heat up. 

He stirs the soup a few times and is about to tap the spoon on the edge of the pot when he hears a voice down the hall. He places the spoon on the counter and walks quietly down the hall toward the bedroom. Liv’s voice—because it’s her, though she’s talking at a higher pitch than usual—carries louder and he stops right outside the door to listen. 

“You like that, don’t you?” she’s asking softly, and even from out in the hall Lincoln can hear Rosie’s steady purr. He sneaks a glance in and sees Liv lying in bed on her back, Rosie on her chest. Liv’s got both hands around Rosie’s face, scratching behind her ears. He ducks back into the hallway, not wanting to disturb them. 

“Yeesss,” Liv says to Rosie, “feels good behind the ears, huh?” Lincoln hears her chuckle and then blow out her breath in what sounded suspiciously like a sigh. “You are a very cuddly kitty, Rosie,” Liv says to the cat, and Lincoln can hear the smile in her voice. “How’d you get like that, huh? You wanna share some of the cuddle wisdom with me?” Rosie meows in a squawky way and Liv laughs. “What was that? You already think I’m cuddly?” There’s silence then for a few long seconds, and then Liv whispers to Rosie confidingly, “Can you tell Lincoln that? He doesn’t have to be unconscious to make touchin’ me okay, right?” Rosie squawks again. “Exactly.”

Lincoln walks back down the hallway to the kitchen, his heart pounding, a knot in his throat. He takes plates out of the cupboard, puts a grilled cheese sandwich on each one, then pours the soup into two bowls. As he’s digging around for a spatula to clean every drop of the soup out of the pot, he stops and it hits him: this is the problem. Every sideways glance from Liv, every quirk of her mouth into a frown, every awkward pause, _everything that’s not working_ —he puts it together with what he’s just heard and almost every time it’s when he’s pulled back from touching her, from being outwardly affectionate. 

Lincoln jumps when he hears Liv’s bare feet padding down the hall toward him, then grabs spoons out of a drawer and turns to greet her. She’s wearing his shirt again and she’s got Rosie in her arms. Lincoln’s face splits into a wide smile. 

“You two bonding?”

“She’s so _fluffy_ ,” Liv says as an explanation, and scruffs Rosie under her chin. 

“That she is,” Lincoln replies, then gestures to the plates and bowls. “I made food.”

“Thank you,” she says with a smile at him, and walks into the kitchen, dropping Rosie carefully on the floor. As she’s passing him, Lincoln feels an urge and— _damn it—_

He grabs Liv by the wrist and pulls her gently toward him, pressing a kiss onto her cheek. 

She blinks up at him in surprise, her face lit up. “What was that for?”

“Because I don’t do it enough,” Lincoln says simply, and Liv narrows her eyes and stares at him.

“Did you hear me talking to Rosie?” 

Lincoln shrugs and opens the refrigerator, pulling out a pitcher of ice water. “Maybe.”

She smacks him on the shoulder. “You jerk. That was private me-Rosie stuff.”

He pours two glasses of water and offers her one. “Should it have been?”

“What?”

He frowns. “I just wish … wish you would tell me what’s bugging you, so I can try to fix it.”

“You don’t need to fix it,” Liv says quickly. “I just figured—it was hard for you to—”

“It _is_ hard,” Lincoln interrupts. “But it shouldn’t be. I _want_ to touch you all the time. _All the time_. Brush hair back from your face, hug you, kiss you, push you—push you up against a wall and—” He breaks off, running a hand through his hair. 

“And what?” she asks softly. “What do you want to do?”

“ _So_ many things,” he says to her in one breath, his voice gone scratchy and ragged. “But I think—whatever the other Nick Lane did to me to make me forget all that stuff that happened with us—it messed me up a little bit. Made me… cautious. About getting close to people. I don’t know, that’s what I think, though.” 

She presses her lips together in a thin line and looks down at the floor, where Rosie is twining around their ankles, moving between them. “So I think—I need to be more open with you about what I want then. And I…” She takes in a deep breath. “I like when you, I don’t know how to put it… when you… surprise me with affection, I guess. I like that. That’s a good thing.”

“And I’d like to do that,” Lincoln replies, reaching a hand out and pulling Liv in closer to him. She presses her forehead against his shoulder and he threads a hand through her hair, soft and still a little damp from the shower. “And I’d like it if you did that with me too, you know.”

“Oh, good,” she says, placing a kiss on the side of his neck. “Because I’ve been holding back.”

“Have you really?” he asks, surprised.

“I thought you maybe had a weird thing with affection—”

“Which I guess I do.”

“—so I didn’t want to… make you uncomfortable.”

“Oh god,” Lincoln says, huffing his breath out in a laugh. “We’ve both been idiots, haven’t we?”

“A little bit,” she says back, giggling against him. 

Lincoln strokes her hair a while, and then she pulls back from him, looking up at him so openly, every line on her face that marked a secret or worry gone for now, and he wraps his arms around her and lifts her off her feet, pulling her up into a kiss. 

After a second he puts her down again and they grab their food and drinks in unison and head to the table. Rosie jumps up onto the chair between them, sticking her head up to look on the table.

“Hey now,” Liv says to her. “This is people food, missy.”

Rosie looks between her and Lincoln, and he puts his hands up. 

“It’s not up to me,” he says to Rosie. “But by the way, thanks for getting Liv’s secret out of her.”

Liv laughs. “Never underestimate the power of fuzzy kitties.”

-

Later, they’re crawling into bed and Lincoln takes a sharp breath, remembering how he crowds Liv. 

“I don’t want to smother you again,” he says. 

“I don’t… really notice,” Liv says. “Usually I like it, I like knowing you’re, uh, with me. Sometimes I wake up and it’s just too much, but you’re not as strong as you think you are. I can untangle you pretty easily.”

“Really?”

“You have a few release buttons,” she says, smirking. “They are tickle-related.”

Lincoln laughs. “I see. And where are your tickle-related buttons?”

“Oh Lincoln,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You don’t think I’m revealing all my secrets to you _that_ easily, do you?” 

“So you’re saying I have to find them myself?” he asks.

Her mouth drops open and she puts a hand out preemptively, but it’s too late—he’s across the bed and on top of her, digging his fingers into her sides and grinning when she squirms and laughs helplessly underneath him. He reaches back to try tickling under her knee, and the shift in balance lets Liv knock him over onto his back and pin his wrists on the bed on either side of him. He sucks in a breath and arches up under her, already half-hard, and she quirks an eyebrow.

“You like that?” she asks. 

He nods, licking his lips and trying to pull his wrists away, just to see, but—she’s strong. He groans and arches his back again. 

“So this is something else we should talk about, don’t you think?” she asks, almost conversationally.

“Yeah. Yeah,” Lincoln replies, brain not quite working. “But let’s keep Rosie out of this one.”

Liv breaks up laughing and he takes the opportunity to free himself and wrap his arms around her back, pulling her down into a kiss. They stay like that for a while, pressing increasingly messy kisses against each other until Liv’s sitting up and pulling her shirt off, then stroking the tips of her fingers from his hair down to his chin. 

“I really, really love you, you know that?” she asks, and he reaches up and pushes a piece of her hair back behind her ear.

“I love you too.”


End file.
